4th round of the Team Tournament. First off I must say that I lost. I lost, but I did it after a mistake after which my higher-rated opponent was able to trade queens off, and being up the quality, it was an easy win.

This is however an interesting example of how a 2200+ is also able to play an awful endgame. GM Igor Smirnov in his excelent course "An Endgame Expert" says that even high-rated players don't know very well how to handle endgames. I fully agree with him. If you want to beat a higher-rated player, the best you can do is learn the principles of endgames, be an expert at it, and get the game to it, because this is the part of the game where it is most likely you can get the closest to a higher-rated player.

A higher-rated player will probably know a lot more of theory than you do, so the opening is not the part where you can beat him/her. The middlegame doesn't look very well either. In fact that's the worst part, since a higher-rated player will surely have a lot of tactical resources. So the best one can do here is just surviving. The endgame, though, is a good opportunity to beat him/her.

Just take a look at the game, and check out how a 2200+ is able to play a very solid opening, a sound and sharp middlegame... and an awful endgame. The move 30...Qa7 is passive. 32...f6 is simply very bad, giving me a wonderful square e6 and full control over the light squares (isn't my bishop light-squared?). 34...Qb8 is again not very good, getting himself away of the a-file, which is Black's main path for the assault to the white king. As I mentioned, then I made a mistake after 45.Ke2 (45.Kf3 was much better). I think I could have fought a little bit more.

Anyway I'm not happy because of the loss, but on the other hand I'm happy to have put on the ropes a 200 points-higher-rated opponent, even though he was up the quality. Why? An active endgame.

One more reason to reinforce my feeling that the endgame is the most important phase of a chess game.